


into the eye of madness

by orphan_account



Series: hell is empty and all the devils are here [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Dark, Gen, High Chaos (Dishonored)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:42:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23918488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: he thinksgod save meand the Outsider bores into his head and smiles with his mouth and whispersyou will never be saved.
Series: hell is empty and all the devils are here [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1750033
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24





	into the eye of madness

**i.**

he is coming home to see her. Jessamine, and Emily too. the boat rocks beneath Corvo as it pushes onward through Dunwall’s choppy, wild waters, so much like the city itself now.

the guard captain, Curnow, asks what’s the first thing Corvo’s going to do when they get back and Corvo says something about finding a decent bottle of whiskey that makes the captain chuckle but he’s not thinking about that, not really. he’s thinking about an Empress, her dark eyes and smiling lips and a voice that is more beautiful than all the songs of the great creatures within the sea. he’s thinking about their daughter’s laughter and her inevitable demands for a story about his travels and the big bows in her hair that she’s so fond of. he’s thinking about ending the day sprawled on a sofa in Jessamine’s private parlor with his family around him, finally, finally relaxing for the first time in so long, and happy even despite the chaos that reigns outside the walls of Dunwall Tower.

he has not told them _I love you_ in far too many months.

(he does not know yet that he will never speak those words again, not even when he finds Emily. she will say it to him anyway. he will hear her, and he will nod, and he will feel a dull warmth in his chest that is quickly vanquished by the thin sheen of cold, empty darkness – of _Void_ – that wraps around him like a coat and infests his soul like bloodflies.)

**ii.**

he has been in prison for six months and his lover’s blood is still caked under his fingernails. filth coats him thickly, like paint; he’s given little enough water to drink, let alone to wash.

there is a note one day. from _them._ he doesn’t know who _they_ are yet but _they_ give him a key to his cell and a keen-edged blade and the first thing he does is chip away the blood from his nails, and he springs drops of his own sometimes but he doesn’t mind the pain because at least he gets to control it this time. at least he can flinch away. his limbs are not locked to a chair so tightly that the chains leave impressions, and he does not have to watch as a hot iron descends and incinerates the hair, first, before it burns into his skin with a smell like searing meat and an agony that he cannot put into words.

 _it is over, now,_ he thinks, but it will never be over. it will never stop hurting.

he bites his tongue and clutches the blade tightly to his chest as he crouches down awkwardly and slips like a twitching, trembling shadow around the guards. he reaches the entrance and he wraps his arm around a guard’s neck but he’s careful, so careful. he doesn’t kill him. doesn’t kill anyone.

then the bomb goes off and he’s free.

he stumbles, falls into the water a hundred feet or more below the bridge. he feels it rush around him, knock him about like a weakened, bedraggled animal, but the feeling of drowning has long since become familiar.

**iii.**

he says _I don’t want to kill anyone_ and Havelock says _okay don’t kill him but do what you have to. get him out of the way_ and Corvo agrees to that.

there is a Mark burning on his hand now but it’s a different kind of burning than the iron. this one is a shock through his veins, burns cold like ice and roars like a storm. this one turns the world bright black and yellow, or takes him to another place between one blink and the next in a shroud of shifting blue light like impure whale oil, and there are so many other things just beyond his reach. he finds whalebone carvings and he traces the ink-stained grooves in them with his fingertips, listening to a god whisper in his ear. he hangs one of the carvings around his neck and rats swarm around him and run with him through the lower streets. the weepers stay away. he runs with beasts of death, and deep down somewhere the weepers are still desperate to cling to life.

the rats leave him when he reaches Holger Square. he releases Overseer Martin from the stocks and he goes on alone.

he creeps far above the guards, and goes directly to the room where he’ll find his targets. he carefully does not wonder at the instincts that guide him. there is poison in one of the cups on Campbell’s table. it’s meant for Curnow, meant for a good man. Corvo tastes the wine in one of them, wondering if it’s the poisoned one, and spills both glasses.

he takes the bottle and shatters it. collects the rune over the fireplace and the scattered coins and one of Sokolov’s elixirs as well as one of Piero’s, collects things like the birds he used to see when he and Emily searched for shimmery sea-shells down at the edge of the water. he waits behind a screen and he listens and wonders and keeps waiting and thinks _I don’t want to kill anyone_ but his hands are shaking and Campbell is _right there._ the man whose voice spoke to him through his living nightmares and whose probing fingers and irons and knives touched Corvo everywhere, demanded he sign a false confession of murder, and Corvo is shivering even in the humid heat that infuses this room.

he daydreams about pressing the heretic’s brand over Campbell’s eye and holding his jaw shut so he can’t scream and stringing him up in the middle of Holger Square, except that it is not a dream and Corvo is not shivering anymore when he returns to Samuel by the river.

**iv.**

_boring,_ the Outsider says. _you have become boring, Corvo. anyone can take a life. but do you know how to save one?_

a deal with Slackjaw lets the Pendleton twins live and keeps Corvo’s hands clean. they aren’t really, they will never truly be clean again, but he doesn’t want Emily to see that. he saves her, and he’s almost the same man she knew half a year ago.

she cries his name when she sees him. he doesn’t say anything at all.

**v.**

she wants to know why he doesn’t speak anymore and nobody can tell her. he was just fine before Campbell and now he isn’t. they’re all wrong in their varying guesses; there is nothing wrong with his voice. but he saves his words for the dead and for the ones who don’t live. he builds a shrine in the attic, pushes things aside and puts it right next to his bed. he speaks to his god but he never kneels. he pretends he doesn’t know that Martin is standing in the doorway watching him, pretends he doesn’t hear Martin’s frantic rituals at night for protection against the Outsider, against heretics, against Corvo.

(the rituals will do nothing. there is nothing that can truly guard against the Outsider or his Marked. if there were then Corvo would have found it already, and used it for himself.)

a guard surprises him one time as he’s turning around a corner. it isn’t even on purpose when Corvo’s blade pierces his heart; he was just in the way. he clenches his Marked hand and an inky-dark chasm opens in the cobblestones, from which rats surge in numbers as though they were spawned by the Void itself.

they see the body and—

they are _hungry._ so hungry. ravenous. they always are, and they will swallow up Dunwall one day. they will swallow up all of the Isles and all of the world in their gnashing, their gnawing, their consuming.

Corvo bends over the railing and coughs up bile until tears leak from his eyes.

only a few strips of meat remain clinging to the guard’s bones when he leaves moments later, and even those are not there for long. the poor are hungry. bones can be boiled down for soup, and nobody really cares where the bones come from anymore. there is nothing left to eat in Dunwall, not outside of the homes of aristocrats, so Dunwall will eat itself.

he watches Sokolov experiment on a woman caged in the corner of his workshop, and thinks about letting the Royal Physician share the guard’s fate.

but Sokolov is needed.

for now.

so Corvo knocks him unconscious and slings the body over his shoulder. he tosses the key on Sokolov’s belt to the woman, and he kills three more guards on the way out. the rats swarm up every time, ever hungry and Corvo is hungry too, and they taste like the Void sliding down his throat.

**vi.**

he could do this without killing anyone. leave the party untouched by violence. one of the lords, Timothy Brisby, offers to take the Lady Boyle away, to where no one will ever find her and to where she can no longer fund Burrows’s cause, and to where she will love Brisby whether she likes it or not.

he takes Corvo’s nod as agreement, and makes a curious noise when Corvo directs him to a nearby washroom.

it’s a simple enough thing to bend time for a few moments, to mask the screams, and cut the man’s hands off. Brisby passes out from shock as soon as time resumes. Corvo wipes the blood on his blade off onto one of the Boyles’ embroidered towels, and he avoids the party guests thereafter. a Miss Adelle White persists in trying to talk to him, and he bends time again to get away from her. she mutters about cultists. it’s surprising that she’s the only one here who’s recognized the Mark on his hand; he’s not even wearing gloves.

he goes upstairs and cuts the throats of all the guards up there, and he rifles through the Boyles’ respective bedchambers until he finds the letter from Burrows in Lydia’s diary. she’s downstairs in the music room; she makes not a sound as she dies.

his Mark flares, and she crumbles to ashes as if she never existed at all.

this is kinder. it has to be.

**vii.**

he lunges forward and his teeth close around something, something soft and taut and moving. he clamps his jaw closed until his teeth click together. there is resistance when he pulls away, and salt-sweet-thick blood drips onto his tongue, stringy bits of flesh trapped between his teeth. his jaw aches. he opens it and laughs, joyously, feeling blood drip down his throat and try to choke him, and he looks at Hiram Burrows’s stunned face and the hole in his neck and Corvo laughs and laughs and aches some more.

he thinks Burrows can’t survive a wound like that but he has to be sure, so he snaps his sword open in one quick movement and slides it into Burrows’ chest. and then yes, yes, Burrows isn’t dead yet but he’s dying, it’s done, so Corvo pulls the sword out and thrusts it in again, listens to Burrows’s gurgling, pleading breaths, and he cuts out the Lord Regent’s heart.

this one is larger than Jessamine’s so he keeps it in a pouch instead of his breast pocket and it doesn’t beat like Jessamine’s so he doesn’t keep it for long. he leaves it at the shrine beside his bed in the Hound Pits.

he thinks _god save me_ and the Outsider bores into his head and smiles with his mouth and whispers _you will never be saved._

**viii.**

he sneaks through the base quietly. so quietly. like a mouse, like a little mouse, like the squeaking, snarling rat he crawled inside to scurry up from the pit they dumped him in. he wants to bite like a rat. his teeth chitter and chatter, he is cold and hungry and sickened while the poison flows in his veins still and grips his tendons tight until he thinks they’ll shred apart. but he’s quiet. doesn’t bite. trembles and moves forward and leans up just a little, yes, that’s it. his hands close around a Whaler’s throat. his blade digs into skin and finds the jugular. hot blood spills out onto Corvo’s hands and makes them slick, but he catches the man when he slumps to the ground like a ragdoll; holds him and lays him down almost gently.

 _what are you doing Corvo stop don’t do this don’t hurt them_ Jessamine says but her words are split apart like heartbeats; like the whir of mechanical things; like the shreds of her soul that drift inside a contraption of metal and muscle, with cogs to replace arteries and a reflecting lens to replace her sight, and Corvo doesn’t hear her. doesn’t hear anything except his own breathing.

he finds every last one of the Whalers, leaves blue and black uniforms stained with red but he’s gentle. a murderer with vengeance on the points of his teeth and mercy in the calluses of his fingers.

there’s a door and he needs the key so he sees when Daud finds the bodies. when Daud falls to his knees and bends over and Corvo watches a scream of rage build in his throat that comes out like a wail, tears spilling over. he hears Daud beg for death, but Corvo will not give it to him, and silently watches the man in an unstained red coat collapse with his cobbled-together family surrounding him. a family of rescued street-rats, whose feet will never again run like the wind and nimble fingers will never pick pockets for a coin and cherry-red mouths will never cry gales of laughter, and a family of broken men who sat at the docks and stared into the ocean until an assassin pulled them back from the edge and gave them something else to stare at, whose eyes will now see no more, and a family of a woman in a red coat like Daud’s, a woman who Corvo found digging through his gear in a building littered with shuffling corpses.

he carried her all the way back to the base on his own breaking spine, and he laid her down in the courtyard. Daud stops crying when he finds her. he trails a hand through her curls, circling around her head like a halo, and he looks at the way the sun shines into her empty eye sockets and sparkles like a flickering candle on the blood pooling in her gut.

 _you took my family. you took my daughter,_ Corvo thinks, _and now I’ve taken yours._

he doesn’t stay any longer to find out what Daud does after that. but he hears rumors a few days later, about the Knife of Dunwall sighted standing at the top of Kaldwin’s Bridge.

**ix.**

only rats still breathe in the Hound Pits Pub, now. the bodies are endless. they feast.

**x.**

a storm howls around Corvo. the metal grating under his feet shakes and jolts with the wind. he runs, and runs. he looks upward and they are at the very edge, Emily and Havelock; illuminated by the searchlight above. _let me go!_ Emily screams. Corvo watches them, frozen stock-still. rain pelts down upon him, the fierce downpour of a dying city, and when his lens flicks to a greater magnification he can see his daughter’s face in detail. raindrops and teardrops alike roll down her cheeks.

there are more stairs, and more grating. he slips on it and gets back up. reaches their level.

 _stay where you are, Corvo,_ Havelock says, _or I jump._

Corvo – the heretic, the murderer, the monster – grins at him through teeth too sharp to be fully human, and walks forward. Emily screams again, _Corvo, save me!_

he sprints, now, and Havelock starts to back up and loses his footing, still gripping Emily tightly to him.

Corvo stops a hairsbreadth away as they fall. she reaches for him.

he smiles at her, and breathes, and

time

keeps

moving.

he is standing alone within the eye of madness. he cannot hear anything, any longer, except for a dull buzzing in his ears. he thinks it is the Outsider laughing.

**Author's Note:**

> I unashamedly love Dishonored and high chaos.


End file.
